Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic

4. Conceptualizing Equality in a Commercial Society: Democratic Visions of Economic Justice

115 4 ߬ Conceptualizing Equality in a Commercial Society Democratic Visions of Economic Justice D ELAWARE’S Robert Coram had a score to settle with the man he sarcastically referred to as “Doctor Blackstone.” In the middle of his 1791 treatise advocating a publicly funded system of universal education , Coram—a self-educated, thirty-year-old librarian, newspaper editor, amateur inventor, Revolutionary War veteran, anti-slavery activist, and schoolteacher from the small port town of Wilmington—devoted a thirty-page chapter (nearly one-third of the entire pamphlet) to a refutation of Sir William Blackstone’s theory of property. He began his attack with a long excerpt from Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69) in which “the Doctor ” admitted that exclusive property rights were difficult to justify: “Pleased as we are with the possession, we seem afraid to look back to the means by which it was acquired, as if fearful of some defect in our title.” Because the historical foundations of property rights were uncertain and thus open to interpretation, Blackstone suggested that “inquiries” into their origins “would be useless, and even troublesome, in common life. It is well, if the mass of mankind will obey the laws, when made, without scrutinizing too nicely into the reasons of making them.”¹ Coram—not the sort who appreciated being told what he should and should not think about—quoted and criticized that last line of Blackstone’s twice in two pages. Why should existing property rights simply be accepted by “the mass of mankind,” ordinary citizens like Coram himself, without a second thought? After all, in another section of his Commentaries, “the Doctor” had argued that “every man” should be “acquainted with those [laws] at least with 116 tom paine’s america which he is immediately concerned, lest he incur the censure of living in society without knowing the obligations which it lays him under.” Blackstone’s hypocrisy outraged Coram. Everyone subject to the laws should understand them, Blackstone seemed to be saying, except when it came to property. Or, as Coram sarcastically summarized it, “Lawyers may know the obligations of society, but the people not.” Writing in 1791 in the shadow of two revolutions fought in the name of the people and inspired by the doctrines of equality and popular sovereignty, Coram regarded Blackstone’s desire to shield property rights from public discussion as little more than “malignant sophistry and absurdity.”² Coram correctly sensed that much had changed since the 1760s to render Blackstone’s “celebrated” text highly vulnerable to attack. When Blackstone had candidly admitted that “property . . . in its origin seems to have been arbitrary ,” he never imagined a potential reader like Coram.³ His book was explicitly addressed to and priced for “gentlemen of independent estates and fortunes [who are] the most useful as well as considerable body of men in the nation.”⁴ Such people would be unlikely to exploit this discomfiting observation about the arbitrary nature of property rights because they had nothing to gain from it. But the worlds of both print and politics had changed dramatically in twenty- five years. The American and French Revolutions fundamentally transformed the nature of public debate by politicizing legions of previously disenfranchised people like Coram. When such democratic reader-citizens trespassed into Blackstone ’s formerly elite-dominated world of print, they interpreted what they read from the perspective of their own social cohort—those artisans or farmers of few means who, in Coram’s words, had been “cheated [of] the bulk of their rights” and left behind in the progress of “civilization.” Thanks to the explosion of popular print in the late eighteenth century, such people now had the ability to disseminate their ideas to an increasingly broad reading public. Coram was thus Blackstone’s nightmare come true, a non-elite who insisted on publicly “scrutinizing too nicely” the undeniably ignominious origins of private property. Pulling down the wall of genteel silence that had previously cordoned discussions of property rights off from public view, Coram argued that “the right to exclusive property is a question of great importance [that] . . . deserves the most candid and equitable solution.”⁵ Like virtually all of his democratic contemporaries , Coram never advocated the abolition of private property. All the same, he spent a good portion of his life formulating a more inclusive conception of property rights that could counter the significant and widening economic conceptualizing equality in a...